With my first set of courses done, I'm looking ahead to the next set. One course in particular offers an interesting challenge.

The course is basically a set of game design exercises, meant for small groups (three or four; I think five would be excessive). Each exercise would go something like this:
Tuesday in class: We play a game or set of games, and analyze them from a game design perspective. The choice of games is relevant to what we'll be doing for the project.
Tuesday-Thursday, homework: Students perform some kind of preliminary market analysis that will be relevant to the project, so they won't be starting from square one. For example, if they'll be designing a game to fit a license, this is where they'd take a look at the license.
Thursday in class: Project is assigned. Groups brainstorm ideas together, and submit their best idea at the end of class.
Thursday-Tuesday, homework: Groups take their best idea and flesh it out into a full concept (one or two pages). Something that would be presentable at a business meeting.

Now, the obvious problem here is that it's an awful lot of work outside of class.

Here's what I'd like to do: delegate the homeworks to one person in each group, and rotate it around. With groups of three students each, and nine projects total in the course, that means each student would have a total of six homeworks, none more than a page or two. Much more manageable.

But what do I do if the number of students isn't divisible by 3?

In the game industry, it's traditional to do a post-mortem at the end of a project: everyone on the development team sits down and tries to identify what went right and what went wrong, as a way of avoiding past mistakes on future projects. I wanted to bring that same spirit to my classes, particularly the one that I'll be teaching again immediately after winter break.

Now, in both cases, brutal honesty is hard to come by. If you're working on a development team, your desire to be honest for the good of the company is tempered by your desire to not tell your boss why he sucks. Likewise, it's hard for students to tell a professor why his class sucks if he hasn't yet submitted final grades. So that much, I'm used to.

That said, there's a self-selection bias that exists in a classroom but not in industry. That is, at a game company everyone on the team shows up for the post-mortem, because it's part of their job and they're getting paid for it, so the people who got burned on the project will be there as advocates for change. After a class is over, the students who hated the experience are going to leave as soon as possible; they don't want to stick around for a post-mortem. The only students who remain will be the ones who were already loving the class and don't want it to end, so any comments will be skewed very positive. Meanwhile, the students who struggled and had real issues won't be there to let me know, so I'm likely to repeat my mistakes by catering to a certain breed of student while possibly alienating others. (Don't get me wrong. The students who participated made some great suggestions that I'm going to implement next time around; I just want more information from a wider range of perspectives, because that tends to lead to more surprises.)

I suppose that's what the student course evaluations are for, but I don't really trust those either. Many students don't take them seriously and will comment more on the professor's hair style than teaching ability; also, it doesn't give me the ability to ask targeted questions ("what do you think about Homework #4?") so the comments may be too general. Oh, and I had my evaluations done about two-thirds of the way through the course, so anything that happened in the last third won't be represented on the evals.

I was thinking of perhaps using class time to conduct a post-mortem, as a way of forcing the issue, but then I'd have to remove something else -- so I'd be cheating my current students out of valuable class time, in order to benefit the students next quarter. Not really fair.

Any other ideas of how I might get honest feedback from all my students -- both the ones that love the course, AND the ones that hate it?

Overall, it went very well, and I'll definitely consider this style of game-demo-exam in future classes. Things I learned, in no particular order:

• I'm not exactly a whiz with video cameras. Even though the final was taped, I have no idea if it recorded sound, or even if it recorded at all, so it's a good thing I wrote everything down as I went.
• Preparation is key, and I didn't do enough of it. In particular, I forgot to make sure there was a PS2 in the room, so I had to take a short recess in order to hunt one down and connect it. Time was very short, and delays like this were deadly.
• Students were absolutely terrified going into the exam; this comes from the prospect of being asked only two or three direct questions, and what if I draw a total blank? As soon as we started, everyone was much more at ease -- it felt a lot like the discussions we've had in class all along -- and I think many of them forgot they were even taking an exam :)
• Students had a tendency to repeat each others' answers, weighing in with their opinion, apparently forgetting that I was only asking for NEW information. These took up a lot of time, particularly on open-ended questions in which everyone had an opinion they wanted to share. I need a new rule to prevent getting bogged down on a single question; I'm considering limiting the "buzz-in" responses to something like three per question instead of unlimited.
• I realized when I had asked a single round of questions that we were about an hour and a half into a two-hour exam, and decided on the fly to go immediately to the "lightning round", and then ask some bonus questions (individually written responses on index cards) with whatever time we had left. This ended up being a reasonable way to deal with time pressure. Unfortunately, it did mean that there was more of a focus on older games (and more class lecture, less reading and terminology) than I'd have liked.
• This really only works with a very small class (<20),>
• Ask the most interesting and thought-provoking questions first, so students can get into the spirit of the exam and really start paying attention. Save the most fun, entertaining questions for last, so students will leave the exam (and the course) on a positive note.
• It helped to talk like a gameshow host, referring to students as "players" or "contestants", asking for a round of applause for our sponsors, and having parting gifts. First because it sounds so ridiculous that it really removes tension, second because it makes the video camera in the room feel more natural.
  

There are times in your life when you realize that it's nearly impossible to share some experiences of your youth with the next generation.

Those kids who saw the Star Wars movies starting with Episode I (instead of IV like the rest of us) will never be able to experience that shock of finally realizing, after all of the conflict, that Vader is actually Luke's father. You just can't un-see the new trilogy to experience the old trilogy with a clean slate.

Similarly, a couple of weeks ago I found (to my surprise) that most of my students had heard of Marble Madness, a wonderful arcade game first released around the time that today's college students were just being born. Why? Because the game has been ported to just about every console machine Atari could get its hands on. My students haven't seen an arcade model (many didn't even know it was an arcade game), but they've seen the NES version.

This is a shame, because there has never been (to my knowledge) a decent port of this game to a home system. The great thing about this game is its play control: you roll this heavy trackball and your marble on the screen moves in the same way. Converting it to a d-pad control simply doesn't work, because it removes that visceral rolling that forms the core of the game; it's like playing a dance/rhythm game with the sound turned off.

So, all of these kids today think of Marble Madness as this mediocre race game for console with lousy play control, not as a perfectly wonderful arcade game with the curse of never surviving a port intact. And that makes me sad.

Due to low enrollment in one of my Winter courses, the focus of the course has changed to something completely different. This happened all of a sudden at the very end of classes this quarter, so it's a bit unsettling.

I'm excited about the content though. This will be a pure design course, with no art or programming to get in the way. It's project-based: students will work (probably in groups) on a set of exercises. I'll cover some physical card and board games, and some paper designs (and project proposals) for digital games. I plan to keep the students on their toes by offering them interesting sets of constraints; I did this before on a semi-regular basis at Hi-Score, so expanding that into a full class shouldn't be too hard.

Here's the strange thing, though. This Fall, I taught a course about rapid prototyping and iterative design, from a technical game design perspective; this was a course where students were expected to actually implement their ideas, sometimes doing some light programming or scripting in the process. It's a pretty advanced course for undergraduates.
Meanwhile, this Winter I'll be teaching a practical game design class. And this Spring I'll teach a game design class that covers the theoretical foundations of the field.

Through a set of circumstances outside of curricular matters, I'll teach these courses in the reverse order that students should be taking them!

Lesson learned: next time I'm introducing a new set of courses to an existing curriculum, offer the lower-level ones with fewer prerequisites first.

Occasionally, a jaded game developer gets fed up with harsh industry practices and decides to strike out on their own, starting their own game company to make their own games. This usually involves moving to a cheaper apartment and eating ramen for awhile.

And occasionally, I'd imagine a jaded university researcher gets fed up with stuffy academic bureaucracy and decides to strike out on their own, doing research as a commercial venture. This also involves ramen, unless they manage to secure a grant first.

If a teacher decides they've had enough of the system, though, there's not much they can really do. Tutoring, maybe, but it's not really the same. I suppose it's because academic programs are accredited; you could start your own university, but it takes millions of dollars, and there's no easy way to do it "on the cheap" that I can tell.

Not that I'm looking to do any of this, mind you. It's just one of those differences I noticed the other day.

Just finished writing up the rules for the interactive final. I'll hand them out in class Monday, but you get to see them here first!

• Students get assigned a unique random number from 1 to 17 (there are 17 students in the class). Randomizing prevents anyone from arguing that I intentionally gave them harder questions, or that they got screwed by sitting next to the wrong people.
• Starting with #1 and incrementing, each student is asked a question. (Most questions will be about a particular game that I'm demoing at the time). The student gives their best answer. Answers are scored as a normal test question.
• After the student in the "hotseat" is done, anyone else may raise their hand to elaborate or disagree. If several students want to chime in at once, start at #17 and decrement. (In this way, a particularly bright student who keeps completing everyone else's answers can't keep control of the spotlight -- once they answer out of turn, everyone else gets a shot before they can try again.)
  
• For those parts of the answer that the student elaborates on correctly, they split the points with the "hotseat" person, 50/50. In this way, the final is collaborative; even if you don't answer your own question fully, you can reclaim some of those points with help from other students. At the same time, students who answer other people's questions can get above 100% on the final. I expect this to have interesting ramifications on students' study strategies...
• For those parts of the answer that the student elaborates on incorrectly, they lose a quarter of the full points (i.e. half of what they would have been entitled to). This is to discourage random guessing. Educated guesses are encouraged (I hope), since it's a 2-to-1 ratio of gains to losses.
• If a student doesn't show up for the final at all, the questions that would have been theirs instead become bonus questions for the group. Everyone gets to answer on an index card, with points given (or taken away) as if they had answered out of turn. Students can choose to only answer partially, or not answer at all.

Time permitting, I'd like to add a "lightning round" at the end, quiz-show style: rapid-fire questions, all with very simple, clear answers, directed at each student in turn, with no answering out of turn. This will be the ideal place for those little tidbits of information that I want everyone to know about the industry, but that can't be demonstrated easily by playing a game.

The final is 2 hours long, which is frighteningly short if I'm asking even just two questions per student (it comes out to about 4 minutes per question on average, including time for me to ask the question, time for the student to answer and time for other students to chime in out of turn). Not sure what I'll do if I run out of time; I'll definitely be practicing everything ahead of time to make sure that I can breeze through my own parts, at least.

So, that's what I've got right now. I'd love to hear your comments.

One of my classes has a final exam. I was planning on actually designing the thing next week, since there's a solid week between the last lecture and the date of the final and I'll have nothing else to do in that time.

Until then, I was planning on working hard to get the last of the grading done, so students will know their grade going into the final. I always liked that as a student, being able to compute exactly how well I need to do on the final to get what grade. I'd like to do that for my students. But I don't really have time to do that AND come up with all of the questions for the final exam.

But then I realized I should really give out study sheets for the final exam (I'm ashamed that I had to be reminded of this by a student). But in order for those sheets to be accurate, I have to know the content of the final...

So, I either have to keep students in the dark about their grades, or keep them in the dark about the final exam, or take a guess of what content I'm going to test on the exam and then try to stick to that. I'll probably do the latter.

Now I know why in some classes, the study sheet would bear no resemblance to the actual content of the final... it's because the final wasn't written until after class was over!

Sometimes, just when I feel like I'm too old to be in touch with my students, they surprise me.

Today they surprised me by recognizing Math Blaster, Number Munchers, Carmen Sandiego and Oregon Trail from their own early childhoods. (This is, like, ten years after MY early childhood when I experienced these games.)

So, apparently the classics never die. Or maybe elementary schools are just hopelessly behind on the technology curve. Or maybe we just haven't had any decent educational games in the past ten years. Either way, it means something.

This Tuesday, Final Fantasy XII is released. One week after that, Guitar Hero 2 hits stores. Two weeks after that -- just in time for finals at my school -- it's the Nintendo Wii . Pretty much everyone in my classes is holding their breath for at least one, if not all three of them. So am I, for that matter.

In theory, in the middle of all this, I'm supposed to be assigning work for my students to do. As if they're going to be the least bit productive with all these wonderful distractions.

It would be so much easier if actually playing the games was the homework assignment. But I know another professor who tried that, only to find that one of the assigned games was delayed a few weeks. Oops.

At the very least, I'm not going to have any time to play these games myself until winter break, so I'll have to make it a policy that anyone giving spoilers in class immediately drops a letter grade :-)

The other half of an interactive final is, of course, the content. So, this one goes out to all the developers and teachers out there:

Topics in the course include:

• business models in the industry
• the process of making games
• history of the industry (including its roots in board games)
• current events
• emerging fields (game journalism, serious games, etc.)
• academic/industry relations.

I'll be putting together a list of questions I can ask on these topics, and find ways to work it in to a discussion on some particular game or other. For example, I can show a game that didn't do well in the marketplace and ask about WHY it didn't do well (maybe it had poor graphics for its time, or maybe it was overshadowed by a major event, or maybe it had poor marketing, or maybe the development team didn't do its job properly). In some cases, actually playing the game can provide some clues here, and I'll choose my examples carefully.

If you have any ideas for good questions to ask (and games to go with them), or good games for discussion (because they have a lot of unique properties), send them to:
ai864 "at" yahoo "dot" com

Please don't post them here in the comments. I don't know if any of my students read this or not, but I'd hate to give an unfair advantage to those who know how to use google :-)

I gave my students a choice: a traditional pen-and-paper exam with the standard true/false, multiple choice, matching, fill-in-the-blank, essay... or an interactive final exam which is obviously more experimental. Absolutely NONE of the students opted for the traditional exam, even though it would probably be easier (or at least, easier to prepare for).

This is good, because now I only have to design one final exam and not two :-)

My first task as a combination game designer / instructor: come up with a set of rules for an interactive final. So far I have:
* I'll demo a series of games, retro and modern. For each game, I'll point out certain aspects of the game and then ask related questions to each student in turn. So, it's kind of like an oral exam. In a group. With games.
* After a student answers (or is unable to answer), other students can elaborate or disagree for extra points.

If you have comments on the rules, feel free to post them here.

The old joke goes something like this:
Q: Why is the infighting so fierce in academia?
A: Because the stakes are so low.

In the game industry, if you need help from someone else in the company, they generally go out of their way to help you. It's intrinsically understood that you're all on the same team, working towards the same goals (i.e. shipping the game, and remaining profitable), so helping your co-workers is just helping yourself.

In college, everyone has their own agenda, and other people's agendas run counter to yours. If you ask someone else for assistance, they may not give it to you unless it serves their needs as well. In fact, they may work to sabotage your efforts if they think your success will cost them resources later on. This is doubly true if you're trying to get help from someone outside your department, as is often necessary when you're teaching an interdisciplinary subject like game development.

For example, ever since the start of Summer, I've been looking to reach out to Computer Science students. If any of my undergrads are going to actually make games, they will either need to know how to program (a rare trait in a telecommunications major) or they will need to know someone who does. Tonight, I met my first CS student -- just one. I'd like to find at least five more that are interested in game development, before winter break, so they can register for a class where they can make a game on a team...

As announced recently by my colleague Darius, the special interest group for game education in the IGDA now has a blog.

So, now it appears I have competition. :-)

One of the classes I'm teaching is all about rapid prototyping. We started on paper and are just now progressing to digital prototypes.

I mentioned on the first day of class that there would be some programming involved, and that the skills students would use would end up being about 25% programming, 25% art, 50% design.

I had the students with programming experience raise their hands, so that they could be identified by their classmates.

I left a full week in the schedule before we started anything programming-related, with no assignments due. I suggested students use the time to either (A) learn a rapid-prototyping tool like Game Maker or Flash; or (B) do a few simple exercises in a tool that they already know, like drawing sprites on the screen; or (C) find someone else in class who knows how to implement some of this stuff, and pair up with them.

On the day the first digital assignment was handed out, all of a sudden it was a huge surprise. We have to actually program? Like, displaying numbers to the screen and having buttons that change those numbers? Ohmigod, that's so unfair, this isn't a Computer Science class, most of us don't know how to program, how did this happen? (The current assignment is to do a functional mockup of a Diablo-like subscreen, displaying HP/Mana and doing some very simple inventory management: equip, unequip, drop.)

Next time around I'll hopefully have some actual CS students taking the class, and I'll pair students up manually instead of letting them do it themselves (and let them change groups on their own... if their other members consent). Maybe instead of a "dead" week, I'll assign some busywork project that forces students to learn how to do some simple prototyping tasks, like drawing to the screen. Beyond that, I'm not sure what else I could have done to prepare students for the shock of actually having to use a computer. Or maybe I'm being totally unfair, and overestimating the capability of a non-CS student to learn and use a game authoring tool (or socially network within the class to find someone else who can).

Comments? Suggestions?

Percentage of my class that has played the arcade version of Dragon's Lair (1983): 0%.

Percentage of my class that is familiar with Gauntlet (1984): ~25%. Mostly from the more recent console versions, and Xbox Live Arcade.

Percentage of my class that played the original Super Mario Bros. (1985): 100%.

I suppose I can expect this to shift up by a year, next Fall.

In the game industry, if I found an interesting article on game design or business or something, I could just pass around the link in email and by the next day everyone will have read it.

In class, if I do the same thing with my students, maybe one or two of them will take the time to click the link. Even if it's something really cool, like listening to Warren Spector and Greg Costikyan cussing or a game you can play for free online.

And I think it comes down to the difference in how these things are approached. In school, I don't think most students think of it as a job (where you get "paid" in grades perhaps?), nor are they concerned with professional development (since learning new stuff is kind of mandated, which automatically turns people off from doing it voluntarily).

I was guilty of this myself; I didn't really develop a solid work ethic until I was 25 or so. But oh, how nice it would be to be able to teach it, since it's practically required to get into the industry (and certainly to do well once you're there)...

It started out so simple. Have students each study their own special topic, in-depth, and present to the class. They're presenting things that everyone in the room should know anyway, like who is Shigeru Miyamoto and why is he important, or what was Origin Systems, so that they don't sound like they were born yesterday when they're rubbing shoulders with veterans at GDC. They may or may not have played Katamari Damacy or Shadow of the Colossus, but they should at least know what it is because they will hear people referring to them.

May as well match up the topics with their relevant courses. If a student is going to speak about Knights of the Old Republic, let's do that on the day when we talk about sequels and licenses. Someone speaking about the ESA should do so on the day we cover game publishing. Spread it out so everything makes sense, and so that I don't have to devote a full day of class to having every student speak about a series of unrelated topics.

But it wouldn't be fair to penalize students who signed up for topics early in the course, would it? Then they only get a few days to prepare, while someone who signs up the last day of class would have many weeks. Every student should have the same amount of time to work on this so it's all fair. One week is plenty of time to prepare for a short (3 to 5 minute) presentation. So, each student signs up for a date, I'll keep the topics secret, and I'll inform each student of their topic a week before they're due to present.

Now, in doing this I wasn't thinking about actual implementation issues, just how fair the policy was. It turns out that doing things this way is really hard for several reasons. First, I have to remember to email the topics a week in advance; I now have reminders posted all over my living space, but there were a couple times when I notified the student late. Second, I had a situation where several students didn't receive their topics by email; something got fragged in the system and they showed up unaware that they had to present anything. In either case I need to give more time to the student, but that pushes back their topic to a class where it's no longer relevant.

Third, students signed up on a sheet that's in my possession, and many of them didn't think to copy the dates they signed up for, so I get a lot of emails asking when someone's next topic is due. The process is definitely not user-friendly.

For this course, I've already set the policy and it seems a bit late to change it now, so I'll just have to suck it up. Next time I do this, though, I'll just make the topics available at the start of the course; it may not be as "fair" but it's a whole lot easier for everyone to follow.

As I forcibly drag myself out of bed at some unholy morning hour so I can get to my class on time, it occurs to me that this is the sort of thing that would never happen in the game industry.

Mostly because if you show up late and say "sorry, I was up late playing this game that I just couldn't put down" people will understand. It's not something anyone should make a habit of, but it is a valid excuse.

As a teacher, of course, I have to show up on time or my students will leave. Many of them probably believe the widespread (but false) legend of some "15 minute rule": if the professor doesn't show up within 15 minutes of the start of class, then allegedly the class is automatically canceled. Sort of like how many of my students want to believe that emulation is legal if you own an original copy of the game, or if you delete it within 24 hours, or if the game is no longer sold in stores (all false).

I've noticed a wonderful trend in AAA (big-budget) games lately: many of them include DVD-style bonus content as unlockables. This includes reference art, developer interviews, and other behind-the-scenes stuff that really gives some insight into the game development process.

These things are great for the classroom. All of the stuff I'm teaching about the theory of how games are made, is reinforced by live developers that made a really sweet game. Some of these developers are important enough that a student should know what they look like in case they meet them at GDC or something.

So far I've found three games in my personal collection with this kind of bonus content:
God of War
Sid Meier's Pirates! (Xbox version)
Guitar Hero

Unfortunately, in all three games, I actually had to play for a bit to unlock these things. But that's the kind of selfless sacrifice I'm willing to make for my students :-)

Have you encountered any other games lately that feature this kind of material? Please let me know!